Scarsdale’s Jacqueline Friedland left a successful career as an attorney to follow her dream of becoming a writer. Four novels later, Friedland, a USA Today and Amazon bestselling author, has made a name for herself with her sensitively crafted historical fiction. In March, she released her newest book, Counting Backwards.
According to Friedland, it’s “the story of a young, up-and-coming attorney who is disillusioned with her corporate law job and takes a pro bono immigration case,” she says. “When she goes to a detention facility to help a woman with what’s supposed to be a very straightforward argument against a deportation order, she begins to suspect that the women in the facility are being subject to medical mistreatment relating to their right to reproduce. As she collects information and shares her theories, nobody believes her except her elderly grandmother. So, she puts her career and marriage on the line and discovers a personal connection to a sordid past that pushes her forward despite these risks.”
Friedland, who earned an MFA from Sarah Lawrence College, was inspired to write the book by research she had conducted as a senior in high school. “Our history teacher told us we had to each pick a Supreme Court case and write a lengthy research paper about it,” recalls Friedland. “I found a case from 1927 that was just a three-paragraph opinion, which is rare for a Supreme Court case both then and now,” she shares. “It was called Buck versus Bell, in which a 17-year-old girl was fighting against the edict that she was to be sterilized. The reason that the state wanted to sterilize her was because they deemed her to be what they called ‘feeble minded.’ I was 17 years old, reading about this 17-year-old who this was happening to, and in the end, they did sterilize her. That case is still law in the United States, which is crazy—and it just stuck with me.”
For Friedland, this is what makes a story worth telling: “I think the thing that most inspires me to write a book is when I hear about something and ask myself, ‘How do more people not know about this?’” she says. When it comes to Friedland’s literary inspirations, she cites writers Jodi Picoult and Charlotte Brontë, and her mother. “She taught me how to be concise and the beauty of a perfectly written sentence,” says Friedland of her mom. “I am so grateful for that.”
Readers can meet Friedland on May 7 at Cedarhurst New York’s Blue Door Books, where she will be reading along with author Rochelle Weinstein, and on May 15 in a conversation with author Nicola Kraus at Bedford Books. Those simply looking for signed copies of Counting Backwards can find them at Scarsdale’s Bronx River Books as well as The Village Bookstore in Pleasantville.
“I think the thing that most inspires me to write a book is when I hear about something and ask myself, ‘How do more people not know about this?’”
Currently, Friedland is planning her next novel while simultaneously promoting Counting Backwards. “I’m trying to spread the word about this book however I can and, in the meantime, I’m also on a deadline for my next book, which is another contemporary story,” she says. “It’s not a dual timeline, but there are two dual narrators. It’s about a female college athlete who begins to crumble under the weight of all of her responsibilities and finds new hope in her relationship with a teenager with autism.”
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